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| Official White House photograph. Obviously afraid of an ATV. (via) |
From “mission accomplished” fighter jock, complete with codpiece,
to a jackass in a dune buggy. Baby, that's our Bush.
Sometimes a picture says it all. But these days the message just makes you
scream. From the tragedy at Haditha to the farce
of oversight, it's been one bumpy ride, as Betty once said. However, nothing
focuses the mind more than the stories coming out of Iraq. Driving just the
other day, I was listening to a report on NPR, which brought grim news of dozens
of killings per day, mass chaos and closed businesses. Not exactly what you
get when Bill O'Reilly interviews Rummy, the disconnect disconcerting rolling
right into the madness of misinformation. However, the story in the New York
Times today has a headline that rattles what reality still remains, As
Death Stalks Iraq, Middle-Class Exodus Begins. All that's left to say
is that President Bush was warned and he didn't care one whit.
Watching General Michael Hayden's confirmation hearing yesterday was just another
chapter in the Administration's book titled insult. But Hayden's one
moment of incredulity came when he uttered, “We just took too much
for granted. We didn’t challenge our basic assumptions.” He's
obviously not been paying attention.
A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the
administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to
provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is
shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You
can't write anything honest, only fairy tales.”The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station
chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely
negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments
that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,”
were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I'm told
was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed
out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd
within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently
retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote
a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the
critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with
more pressure on the accelerator.”In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that
year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic
about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. … …“Fairy
Tales”
The (lack of) intelligence underpinning Bush's Iraq policy
Yes, indeed, as Hayden
stated yesterday, intelligence has become “the football in American political
discourse.” Maybe that's because the man at the top believes that things like
border security are helped by photo ops in dune buggies, or by putting a man who doesn't
appreciate the Fourth Amendment and doesn't realize the CIA got it right on Iraq, but nobody wanted to listen, in charge of spying. So now we'll have two people who ignore intelligence
opting for the “fairy
tales” told by suck ups.
There are so many reasons Iraq has imploded, none having to do with the CIA. The first is represented by the leader of the free world who has taken to riding
around in a dune buggy on the border.
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